Concentrating entanglement by local actions: Beyond mean values

Suppose two distant observers, Alice and Bob, share some form of entanglement - quantum correlations - in some bipartite pure quantum states. They may apply local operations and classical communication to convert one form of entanglement to another. Since entanglement is regarded as a resource in quantum information processing, it is an important question to ask how much classical communication, which is also a resource, is needed in the inter-conversion process of entanglement. In this paper, we address this important question in the many-copy case. The inter-conversion process of entanglement is usually divided into two types: concentrating the entanglement from many partially entangled states into a smaller number of maximally entangled states (i.e., singlets) and the reverse process of diluting singlets into partially entangled states. It is known that entanglement concentration requires no classical communication, but the best prior art result for diluting to N copies of a partially entangled state requires an amount of communication on the order of /spl radic/N. Our main result is to prove that this prior art result is optimal up to a constant factor; any procedure for approximately creating N partially entangled states from singlets requires /spl Omega/(/spl radic/N) bits of classical communication. Previously not even a constant bound was known for approximate entanglement transformations. We also prove a lower bound on the inefficiency of the process: to dilute singlets to N copies of a partially entangled state, the entropy of entanglement must decrease by /spl Omega/(/spl radic/N). Moreover, we introduce two new tools - /spl delta/-significant subspaces and the standard form protocol reduction in entanglement manipulations. We hope that these two new tools will be useful in other work in quantum information theory.

Bipartite and multipartite entangled states are of central interest in quantum information processing and foundational studies. Efficient verification of these states, especially in the adversarial scenario, is a key to various applications, including quantum computation, quantum simulation, and quantum networks. However, little is known about this topic in the adversarial scenario. Here we initiate a systematic study of pure-state verification in the adversarial scenario. In particular, we introduce a general method for determining the minimal number of tests required by a given strategy to achieve a given precision. In the case of homogeneous strategies, we can even derive an analytical formula. Furthermore, we propose a general recipe to verifying pure quantum states in the adversarial scenario by virtue of protocols for the nonadversarial scenario. Thanks to this recipe, the resource cost for verifying an arbitrary pure state in the adversarial scenario is comparable to the counterpart for the nonadversarial scenario, and the overhead is at most three times for high-precision verification. Our recipe can readily be applied to efficiently verify bipartite pure states, stabilizer states, hypergraph states, weighted graph states, and Dicke states in the adversarial scenario, even if only local projective measurements are accessible. This paper is an extended version of the companion paper Zhu and Hayashi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 260504 (2019).

Both entanglement and nonlocality are central concepts in modern physics. Their relation, however, is not fully understood yet. In 1964, Bell showed that some entangled states are nonlocal, in the sense that the statistics obtained when certain measurements are performed on them would violate a Bell inequality (Bell, Physics, 1:195–200, 1964, [Bel64]). In 1991, Gisin showed that every pure bipartite entangled state is nonlocal (Gisin, Phys Lett A 154:201–202, 1991, [Gis91]), a result that was later generalized to any multipartite pure entangled quantum state a bit later by Popescu and Rohrlich (Phys Lett A 166:293–297, 1992, [PR92]). Thus, one could naively identify nonlocality and entanglement, however, this intuition is—like in many situations in quantum physics—misleading, as the relation between those two quantum information resources is more involved.

We investigate the problem of producing local pure states by performing local noisy operations assisted by one-way classical communication on a given bipartite mixed state in the one-shot setting. We consider the following two scenarios:1)Scenario I: A party, say Alice, is provided with a single copy of some quantum state ρ^A on system A. The task for Alice is to extract pure qubit states using only noisy operations on A. We call this task purity concentration.2)Scenario II: Two parties, Alice and Bob possess the A and B sub-systems, respectively, of a given bipartite quantum state ρ^AB. They are allowed to perform any local noisy operations and communicate via a one-way dephasing (i.e., classical) channel. The task for them is to design a protocol using these resources such that together they can extract pure local qubit states from the shared state ρ^AB. We call this task local purity distillation.

The theory of the asymptotic manipulation of pure bipartite quantum systems can be considered completely understood: the rates at which bipartite entangled states can be asymptotically transformed into each other are fully determined by a single number each, the respective entanglement entropy. In the multipartite setting, similar questions of the optimally achievable rates of transforming one pure state into another are notoriously open. This seems particularly unfortunate in the light of the revived interest in such questions due to the perspective of experimentally realizing multipartite quantum networks. In this talk, we report substantial progress by deriving simple upper and lower bounds on the rates that can be achieved in asymptotic multipartite entanglement transformations. These bounds are based on ideas of entanglement combing and state merging. We identify cases where the bounds coincide and hence provide the exact rates. As an example, we bound rates at which resource states for the cryptographic scheme of quantum secret sharing can be distilled from arbitrary pure tripartite quantum states. This result provides further scope for quantum internet applications, supplying tools to study the implementation of multipartite protocols over quantum networks.

One-qubit pure states, living on the surface of Bloch sphere, can be mapped onto the usual complex plane by using stereographic projection. In this paper, after reviewing the entanglement of two-qubit pure state, it is shown that the \emph{quaternionic} stereographic projection is related to concurrence measure. This is due to the fact that every two-qubit state, in ordinary complex field, corresponds to the one-qubit state in quaternionic skew field, called quaterbit. Like the one-qubit states in complex field, the stereographic projection maps every quaterbit onto a quaternion number whose complex and quaternionic parts are related to Schmidt and concurrence terms respectively. Rather, the same relation is established for three-qubit state under \emph{octonionic} stereographic projection which means that if the state is bi-separable then, quaternionic and octonionic terms vanish. Finally, we generalize recent consequences to $2 \otimes N$ and $4\otimes N$ dimensional Hilbert spaces ($N\geq 2$) and show that, after stereographic projection, the quaternionic and octonionic terms are entanglement sensitive. These trends are easily confirmed by direct computation for general multi-particle W- and GHZ-states.

I show that bound entanglement strongly influences the quantum entanglement processing of pure states: If N distant parties share appropriate bound entangled states with positive partial transpose, all N‐partite pure entangled states become inter‐convertible by stochastic local operations and classical communication (SLOCC) at the single copy level. This implies that the Schmidt rank of a bipartite pure entangled state can be increased, and that two incomparable tripartite entanglement of the GHZ and W type can be inter‐converted by the assistance of bound entanglement. Further, I propose the simplest experimental scheme for the demonstration of the corresponding bound‐entanglement‐assisted SLOCC. This scheme does not need quantum gates and is feasible for the current experimental technology of linear optics.

We present a novel protocol for teleportation of arbitrary bipartite pure and mixed state with shared cluster entanglement in this paper. By employing Bell-state measurement on the teleported state and the shared cluster state twice, a sender could transmit the arbitrary bipartite state to a distant receiver. We show the good feature of the cluster state channel, with which it can realize the deterministic teleportation rather than probabilistic one. Moreover, since we require less particles to be shared and need no auxiliary qubit in our protocol, it is more efficient and applicable than the previous schemes.

Bell inequality violation has been widely tested by using the bipartite entangled pure states and properly encoding the local observables in various experimental platforms, and the detector-, local-, and random loopholes have already been closed. A natural question is, how to deliver the Bell inequality violation by properly encoding the local observables? Here, we show that the Bell inequality violation is directly related to the coherence degree, which is controllable by encoding the different local observables into the entangled state. With the usual space-like correlation detections, we show that the coherence degree can be measured and thus the Bell nonlocality can be tested. The feasibility of the proposal is demonstrated by a numerical experiment typically with the cavity quantum electrodynamic system, in which the coherence degrees of the locally encoded bipartite entangled state can be conveniently measured by the spectral detection of the driven cavity. The present work might provide a feasible approach to verify the Gisin theorem, i.e., Bell inequality can be violated for any bipartite entangled pure state, once the local observables are properly encoded into the entangled state for keeping the desirable coherence.

The concept of entanglement splitting is introduced by asking whether it is possible for a party possessing half of a pure bipartite quantum state to transfer some of his entanglement with the other party to a third party. We describe the unitary local transformation for symmetric and isotropic splitting of a singlet into two branches that leads to the highest entanglement of the output. The capacity of the resulting quantum channels is discussed. Using the same transformation for less than maximally entangled pure states, the entanglement of the resulting states is found. We discuss whether they can be used to do teleportation and to test the Bell inequality. Finally we generalize to entanglement splitting into more than two branches.

We derive a family of necessary separability criteria for finite-dimensional systems based on inequalities for variances of observables. We show that every pure bipartite entangled state violates some of these inequalities. Furthermore, a family of bound entangled states and true multipartite entangled states can be detected. The inequalities also allow us to distinguish between different classes of true tripartite entanglement for qubits. We formulate an equivalent criterion in terms of covariance matrices. This allows us to apply criteria known from the regime of continuous variables to finite-dimensional systems.

We consider the problem of how to manipulate the entanglement properties of a general two-particle pure state, shared between Alice and Bob, by using only local operations at each end and classical communication between Alice and Bob. A method is developed in which this type of problem is found to be equivalent to a problem involving the cutting and pasting of certain shapes along with a certain colouring problem. We consider two problems. Firstly we find the most general way of manipulating the state to obtain maximally entangled states. After such a manipulation the entangled state |11>+|22>+....|mm> is obtained with probability p_m. We obtain an expression for the optimal average entanglement. Also, some results of Lo and Popescu pertaining to this problem are given simple geometric proofs. Secondly, we consider how to manipulate one two particle entangled pure state to another with certainty. We derive Nielsen's theorem (which states the necessary and sufficient condition for this to be possible) using the method of areas.

This paper shows that an arbitrary Gaussian pure state can be deterministically generated in a dissipative open system that has quasi-local interactions between the subsystems and couples to surrounding environment in a local manner. A quasi-local interaction, which means that the interaction occurs among only a few subsystems, is a crucial requirement for practical engineering of a dissipative system. The key idea is that, first, an auxiliary system having local interaction with environment is prepared, and then that auxiliary system is coupled to the underlying target system via a set of two-body Hamiltonians in such a way that a desired pure state is generated. Moreover, we show that, even with a simple single-mode auxiliary system, deterministic generation of an arbitrary approximate Gaussian cluster state is possible, by devising an appropriate switching scheme. Lastly, we discuss in a specific example how much a dissipation-induced pure Gaussian state can be perturbed by decoherence and parameter error.

We study partial coherence and its connection with entanglement. First, we provide a sufficient and necessary condition for bipartite pure-state transformation under partially incoherent operations: A bipartite pure state can be transformed to another one if and only if a majorization relationship holds between their partial coherence vectors. As a consequence, we introduce the concept of maximal partial coherent states in the sense that they can be used to construct any bipartite state of the same system via partial incoherent operations. Second, we provide a strategy to construct measures of partial coherence by use of symmetric concave functions. Third, we establish the relationship between partial coherence and entanglement. We show that the minimal partial coherence under local unitary transformations is also a measure of entanglement for bipartite pure states, which can be extended to all mixed states by convex-roof extension. Conversely, every entanglement measure can be constructed as a partial coherence measure, and we further show that partial coherence measures are induced through maximal entanglement under partially incoherent operations for bipartite pure states.

We propose a deterministic remote state preparation scheme for photon polarization qubit states, where entanglement, local operations, and classical communication are used. By consuming one maximally entangled state and two classical bits, an arbitrary (either pure or mixed) qubit state can be prepared deterministically at a remote location. We experimentally demonstrate the scheme by remotely preparing $12$ pure states and $6$ mixed states. The fidelities between the desired and achieved states are all higher than $0.99$ and have an average of $0.9947$.